


The Last of the Zeroes

by pauraque



Category: Paradises Lost - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Blood, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-14
Updated: 2009-06-14
Packaged: 2017-10-27 10:04:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/294542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pauraque/pseuds/pauraque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last of the Zeroes

**Author's Note:**

> Though I wrote this story after reading _Paradises Lost_ and it uses some of the details from that world, I think it can be understood without intimate knowledge of the canon. The least you need to know is that it takes place on a [generation ship](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship).

_People are permitted to go without conshots on the following conditions or undertakings: sterilization, or completion of menopause; a pledge either of chastity or of strict homosexuality; or an intention to conceive, formally declared by both the man and the woman._  
Le Guin : Paradises Lost

When 0-Smith Lucas was very young, he read science fiction, and he thought that he wanted to live that way, to visit another galaxy like going to a different country. High warp, wormholes, relativistic ignorance. He would come back and everyone he knew would still be here on Earth. The universe was close and connected, the jewel stars strung together like diamonds on a necklace, and as concrete as that too, cool and beautiful and solid as they slipped beneath his hands.

 

**Suspension**

When they tested the people who would become the zeroes, they made them get on military airplanes and fly at high altitudes for weeks at a time. Would they go stir-crazy right away? It was early on; it was to weed out the ones who weren't serious at all.

As others cracked and worried, complained it wasn't a fair test because on the real ship it would be _different_ — Lucas passed it easily, even enjoyed it, the slow suspended animation of air travel, and the thin blue pallor of the sky.

 

**The Right Stuff**

Lucas had not thought to lie about being gay when he was first interviewed. (Gay is a word that sticks strangely in his mind now, though he does not use it anymore — he is only homosexual now, for gay is a culture.) Surely if he had lied, they would have found out anyway. So he didn't think, really, at the beginning, that they would want him. It was almost a lark to apply. Why would they want him? The people who left on the ship would only serve to make more, to produce the middle generations, the descendents.

But they told him it wasn't a problem, they weren't there just to breed — they only had to replace themselves, after all — but he had the right attitude. The right skills (he was a surgeon). He could survive, mentally, going on a voyage knowing he would never see the destination.

 

**There Is No Away**

There are no infections on the ship, so Lucas has spent his life — this life, the new one — treating idiopathies. There is still cancer on the ship.

Interesting.

Lucas treats pregnant women. It does not happen very often, but he aborts accidental or unauthorized conceptions. He remembers when this would have caused a controversy — _where_ it would have, rather — but that begins to seem distant. There is no one to object, because everyone here agreed to the rules when they started, and that is their culture now. There has not been time for any of the ones or twos to figure out how to think otherwise.

Lucas remembers screaming protesters red-faced with signs, as there were when the ship was launched, and he thought about them as they went into orbit. He could not see them then, but he thought of them, becoming distant and finally a pinpoint, and then no more.

As he disposes of the tissue an odd thought strikes him — this is fuel, this extra Stuff grown in a closed system. Not much of it, but it grew where there was nothing before, like the new green plants sprouting in the hydroponics section. The embryo is recycled, not thrown away. There is no away to throw it. People say that, sometimes, as though it is news, but Lucas thinks there was no away on Earth, either.

 

**Open Heart**

1-Katsura Christopher was born in Year 15; his mother was a bit old when he was born, and Lucas was at her side, ensuring nothing went wrong.

When he grew up, Christopher decided he wanted to be a doctor, and he went to school for it (Lucas wondered what kind of doctors the one-and-ups would be, never having seen infection firsthand), and he came to work with Lucas.

"Help me hold this," Lucas said to him, and Christopher took the retractor from him, and their fingers touched. They both looked at each other, and Christopher smiled crookedly and looked back down at the patient's open chest.

It was still strange to Lucas even then, to do surgery without gloves or masks, but of course they didn't need them, and disposables were an impossibility in any case. He reached in with both hands now, and gently lifted the beating heart to one side, to see the damage. Blood and other things touched Lucas's bare skin, and wicked into the networked wrinkles of his hands.

 

**Out**

Lucas had a cat when he was in school, and never let it out, because he wasn't supposed to have it. His friend left the window open one day, and Lucas didn't know the cat was gone until he heard the faint scratching at the door, and opened it in astonishment to see his cat wide-eyed and leaning into the door jamb.

The cat came in and hid in Lucas's bed for a long time, perhaps trying to shake off the nightmare of the time she accidentally got outside the world.

Lucas tried to tell Christopher this story as they were lying in bed one night, but it was strange to Christopher, who had never seen a cat except in pictures.

 

**Two of Each Kind**

Christopher had never known hatred for loving a man. Lucas did not know why, then, Christopher chose him — he always thought that young queers sought older men because they were looking for acceptance from an authority figure. Christopher was if anything a darling of the authorities, a model, the first great surgeon produced entirely by the shipboard educational system. _It can work_ was the gleeful thought behind the grins of the zeroes when they looked at him. _We were right_.

As for being homosexual, it had begun to seem salutary, even in Lucas's time. There are always people who want more kids, and Christopher was letting them have them. He was even conserving supplies, since he didn't need his conshots.

Lucas dreamed, and he dreamed that they woke up in the morning, and they walked the corridors of the ship and they were empty of life, all the people were lying dead. It was only him and Christopher left, the two of them laughable and sterile. And they went on together alone. They would reach the new world (in the dream it was much nearer), and they would helplessly be taken there, be landed there, unable to turn around. And they would live there a little while, and they would die, and there would be no more.

Lucas woke from this dream angry at himself.

 

**Evolution**

Lucas wonders, sometimes, what will happen to the people after the sixes. Will they keep the memory of how they got there, of the ship, of Earth?

Will they even believe it?

He imagines what would have happened on Earth if they had looked back and found the creation story true: the sudden appearance of Man, dropped into a divine garden from the heavens. We didn't come from monkeys! We didn't come from anything! In the before-time, we lived in the sky, and we came down...

That is assuming, of course, there is anyone after the sixes, anyone to have such thoughts.

 

**The only thing that goes away**

There came a time for Lucas that he regretted leaving Earth, and it was when they had gone so far that even if they turned around, he would have been dead before they got back. He is an old man now, and drifting off into space. There are so few zeroes anymore, they die off one by one under Lucas's hands. The knowledge of Earth. Anyone who remembers wind, rain, sky, pollution. They are old men and women, and they do not want to sit with Lucas and talk of old times. They want only to die in peace, not to hurt anymore. Their purpose is fulfilled.

 

 _Lovers do not run away (where is away?)._  
Le Guin : Paradises Lost

0-Kim Eunjin dies, and then Lucas is the last of the zeroes.

He is dying of cancer at the age of 93, and even though he knows it isn't true, he blames the years of touching cancer with his bare hands. My life for want of latex gloves! Cholera from a well! My God, these people are going to die, aren't they, die of ignorance and the horror of disease.

Lucas can barely remember it anymore, crowded hospitals full of people coughing and sniffing, tuberculosis, malaria, influenza. Another world, indeed, where a sneeze was never just a sneeze, but the very figure of death. Bless you. It has been sixty years since Lucas said that.

Christopher is with him, and they talk and they cry. They have loved each other for a long time. Love, it turns out, is not infectious; it can survive sterile conditions. Christopher knows that Lucas is leaving, but Lucas knows he already left, sixty years ago. Perhaps we all do, all must, but must we do it twice? Lucas smiles. There is no one to let him back in, it is forever now, he has gone outside the world.


End file.
